Rock And Pop

Arguably the most anticipated British album release of all time, ‘Be Here Now’ was recorded with producer Owen Morris at Abbey Road Studios, Ridge Farm Studios, and Air Studios between October 1996 and May 1997.

Originally released at midnight on Thursday August 21st 1997, ‘Be Here Now’ sold 700,000 copies in just 3 days and remains, to this day, the fastest selling UK album on release. To date it has sold over 8 million copies worldwide. Oasis released three singles from the album, two of which - ‘D’You Know What I Mean?’ and ‘All Around The World’ – charted at No.1, with ‘Stand By Me’ reaching No.2.

The album has now been re-mastered from the original tapes and the deluxe edition format features bonus content of B-sides, rare and unreleased Oasis tracks from the ‘Be Here Now’ era, plus a brand new Noel Gallagher mix of ‘D’You Know What I Mean?’.

Jackie won two BBC Folk Awards in February 2009 including the award for Best Newcomer and is a former member of Mercury-nominated Rachel Unthank & The Winterset. The album is for the first time produced by her brother, the multi-award winning Jim Moray, and features a song written especially for Jackie by Alasdair Roberts, who also performs on two tracks.

Highly anticipated stunning third album from Danish born singersongwriter Agnes Obel, the follow up to her UK breakthrough record ‘Aventine’. Recorded, mixed and produced by Obel in Berlin, where she currently resides, ‘Citizen Of Glass’ is a work of haunting beauty and an expansion of Obel’s mesmerising world. The title surfaced in Obel’s mind while touring ‘Aventine’ and, inspired by modern composers, the album conceptually and thematically revolves around the leitmotif of transparency. On this record Obel experiments with her vocals in inventive new ways, in order to manipulate them into alternative versions of her own voice, as can be heard on first single ‘Familiar’. Obel also incorporates a number of different instruments, such as the Trautonium (an extremely rare instrument that possesses a glistening, glass-like sound), alongside vibraphone, cembalo, cellos and more.

In the winter of 2016, Conor Oberst found himself hibernating in his hometown of Omaha after living in New York City for more than a decade. He emerged with the unexpectedly raw, unadorned solo album Ruminations. “I wasn’t expecting to write a record. I honestly wasn’t expecting to do much of anything. Winter in Omaha can have a paralyzing effect on a person but in this case it worked in my favor. I was just staying up late every night playing piano and watching the snow pile up outside the window. Next thing I knew I had burned through all the firewood in the garage and had more than enough songs for a record. I recorded them quick to get them down but then it just felt right to leave them alone,” says Oberst.

Conor Oberst’s new album, Salutations, is a companion piece to 2016’s lauded Ruminations. When Oberst wrote and recorded the songs on Ruminations, entirely solo – with just voice, piano, guitar and harmonica – he intended to ultimately record them with a full band. In the midst of putting together that band – upstate New York’s The Felice Brothers plus the legendary drummer Jim Keltner (Neil Young, Jackson Browne, George Harrison, Bob Dylan, John Lennon, and many more) – the passionate responses Oberst was getting to those first solo recordings, from friends and colleagues, encouraged him to release the songs as-is, in their original sparse form, as his seventh solo album: Ruminations, which was released in October 2016. Pitchfork called it ‘A record like none other in Oberst’s catalog, stunning for how utterly alone he sounds,’ and the Sunday Times called it, ‘The rawest album yet from the forever troubled one-time voice of a generation. Political and very, very personal,’ saying Oberst is ‘One of the best songwriters around.’

’Saturday’ is Brit Pop band Ocean Colour Scene’s ninth studio album and marks the 21st anniversary of their formation in 1990. After touring with Oasis in 1995 and chart success with ’Moseley Shoals’, Ocean Colour Scene continued to release new material as well as a stem of successful live albums. ’Saturday’ continues with the band’s brand of retro orientated rock and was recorded at the iconic Rockfield studios.

Of Monsters And Men seemed to have an effortless, impeccable rise. The band’s debut album was an international hit, a bittersweet cross between Arcade Fire and a lust for the perfect pop song. Now they’re back with their second album ’Beneath The Skin’. Of Monsters and Men gets bigger and barer on its sophomore album. ’Beneath The Skin’ amplifies the sound of the Icelandic group’s debut ’My Head Is an Animal’ while also peppering its anthems with more revealing lyrical passages.

Of Montreal is one of the preeminent indie bands of the past 20 years -- critical darlings who have received praise from the likes of Rolling Stone, The New York Times, Pitchfork, Village Voice, LA Times, Entertainment Weekly and SPIN. They are known the world over for their over-the-top live show spectacle which has included frontman Kevin Barnes riding a live horse out onto the stage at Roseland Ballroom in New York City, elaborate stage sets, and often features more theatrical performers than musicians. The band has performed at everything from Coachella to Bonn- aroo, Lollapalooza to Sasquatch and even Hollywood Bowl opening for Miss Grace Jones.

After seeing success with their four EPs, ex-Black Flag/Circle Jerks frontman Keith Morris, Burning Brides’ Dimitri Coats, Hot Snakes/Rocket from the Crypt/Earthless’ Mario Rubalcaba, and Redd Kross’ Steven McDonald went into the studio to record 16 songs in only a few days. Like their previous EP compilation, this is a quick and direct one that perfectly captures the raw, vital energy of Reagan-era hardcore punk.

The newly shorn Oh Sees waste no time in racing headlong into nightmarish battle with the mighty Orc, and wouldn’t ya know it, they’ve clawed even farther up the ghastly peak last year’s A Weird Exits stormed so satisfyingly. The band is in tour-greased, anvil on a balance beam, gut-pleasingly heavy form, nimbly braining with equal dashes of abandon and menace on this fresh batch of bruisers and brooders, hypnotically stirred into to the cauldron of chaos you’ve come to expect from, ahem, Oh Sees. Fresh blood Paul Quattrone joins Dan Rincon to form a phalanx of interlocking double drums, alternately propelling and fleet footing shifting ground to pinion Dwyer’s cliff-face guitars to the boogie. Tim Hellman keeps it swinging like a battle-axe to the eyebrows. The tunes veer towards the violence of their live shows, with a few tasty swerves into other lanes… heavy to lush, groovy to stately… throughout it remains sinister in its swaggering skulk, manic in its fuzz-fried fugues… they hit all the sweet spots the heads foggily remember, and there’s plenty to sweat over if you just hopped into the sauna. Ew. More evil…more complex… more narcotic… more screech…. more blare…. more whisper… there’s even more Brigid. Less “Thee”, but more of everything else.

In an era in which ‘psychedelia’ can often mean merely a grab-bag of influences from which wah-wah pedals and two-note riffs are dispensed as signifiers and signposts into a realm of easy accessibility as opposed to gateways to another dimension, it can be a rarity to come across a band who are genuinely fixated on creating alternate realities for the listener. Yet this is exactly how Stockholm’s Josefin Öhrn + The Liberation view their incandescent art, and it’s this sensibility that’s led to the kaleidoscopic spendour of their debut full-length for Rocket Recordings, ‘Horse Dance’.

This picks up exactly where The Stage Names left off, delving deeper in to it’s story and themes with cerebral lyrics that get under your skin. It’s a deeply ambitious labor of love commenting in a (non judgmental) way on the nature of pop music and the culture that goes with it.

This is one of the most hotly anticipated releases of 2014 so far - the buzz on Angel Olsen from her previous releases has been growing steadily for the last year or so, coupled with sold out solo London shows and a mesmerizing performance at the End Of The Road festival.

Now she unleashes this majestic album - her first with a full band - and it is wowing critics and fans. This is going to be Angel’s breakout year.

With Half Way Home, her first proper solo album following some lesser EP and cassette material, Chicago songwriter Angel Olsen constructs a landscape so starkly beautiful it’s surprising she can hide any of the emotional intricacies of her songs in a sound so wide open. Olsen spent some time collaborating with Bonnie "Prince" Billy on tour and singing on his records as part of the Cairo Gang, and while relating her sad-souled Americana songs to those of Bonnie Billy’s wouldn’t be wrong, that lazy comparison doesn’t really do justice to their complexity.

"Anyone reckless enough to have typecast Angel Olsen according to 2013’s Burn Your Fire For No Witness is in for a rethink with her third album, MY WOMAN. The crunchier, blown-out production of the former is gone, but that fire is now burning wilder. Her disarming, timeless voice is even more front-and-center. Yet, the strange, raw power and slowly unspooling incantations of her previous efforts remain. Over two previous albums, she gave us reverb-shrouded poetic swoons, shadowy folk, grunge-pop band workouts and haunting, finger-picked epics. MY WOMAN is an exhilarating complement to her past work, and one for which Olsen recalibrated her writing/recording approach and methods to enter a new music-making phase.